James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

More crackles and pops. Light from outside fell through the window, pushing a slab of brightness into place on floor and wall, darkening the rest of the room.

“Never easy, is it?” I said.

“No reason it should be.”

We stood poised on parallel wires, balance poles like cats’ whiskers out at our sides.

“You have somewhere to stay?”

“Temporarily…. I’m sorry, Lew.”

“Me too.”

“I love you, you know.”

“Yes.”

I hung up the phone. From nowhere Bat appeared, leaping onto the nightstand. He sat there, eyes fixed upon me, purring, then collapsed, paws hooked over the edge. Telling me another life was there alongside my own, that I wasn’t alone after all.

“Thank you for coming. Can Mrs. Molino get you anything? Coffee? Something to eat, perhaps. A sandwich? We’ve just received a fine Virginia ham-shipped in from North Carolina, not Virginia, as it happens. Or since we’re well along in the afternoon, perhaps a single malt. Some years ago you had, as I remember, a taste for Scotch.”

“Taste had little to do with it.”

“So I understood at the time.”

My eyes were on Catherine Molino, standing near the door through which I’d entered. What looked to be an original Ingres floated above her left shoulder, a framed Picasso drawing, four abrupt lines coming together in the most improbable manner, at her right. Black, Oriental-looking hair gathered in a clip at the base of a swanlike neck. Designer jeans and a man’s white dress shirt with sleeves rolled, tails out, handmade brocade vest over.

“I’m good, thank you.”

Mrs. Molino smiled, nodded once and withdrew. Smile, nod and withdrawal all equally engaging.

“Alouette, I take it, proved otherwise occupied and unable to accompany you?”

“I saw no reason to ask-as I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course.”

Looking far too small for it, Guidry sat in an antique highback wheelchair, as though the chair with time might be diminishing him, gaining by increments some stature drained from him. The room was warm enough to have orchids sprouting from cracks in the walls; nonetheless a blanket covered lap and legs.

“An old man’s blood goes thin,” he said as I took off my coat, “turns from wine to water,” and hung the coat across the back of my chair.

Here, we were well apart from the world I watched go on about its business outside the window. Everything in the room, carpet, curtains, walls, blanket, was blue-green, and all of it seemed slightly out of focus, fluid, shimmering. Here we moved at a much slower pace than those out there in that other world.

I’m underwater. This room’s an aquarium.

“Once again, Mr. Griffin, I thank you for coming. You had little enough reason or inclination to do so.”

“True.”

“So why have you come?”

“To be quite honest, Dr. Guidry-”

“Horace. Please.”

“-I’m not sure. I’ve nothing to offer. Nor is there anything I want from you.”

“Of course.”

We sat quietly a moment. Half a block away, girls in plaid skirts and white shirts with pocket crests pumped swings higher and higher while young men in charcoal slacks and white shirts with clip-on ties shot baskets. All of this soundless outside the aquarium walls.

Turn off sound and even the most familiar scenes, the commonest human gestures, turn strange on you. Not to mention what strange lives these were to me in the first place, how impenetrable. Nothing whatsoever to do with my own. I might as well be watching lobster or rays in their tanks. Ant farms. Beehives.

“Just felt I should be here, I guess.”

“Intuition. Much of your life has been shaped by it.”

“What shape there’s been, yes.”

“And not always to your benefit.”

That, too, I had to concede.

“Still you persist.”

I shrugged. “As good a guide as any other, finally.”

“ Anything can save you if you grab it hard enough, and hold on. ” He smiled. “You’re surprised that I’ve read your books.”

“I’m surprised anybody’s read them. Surprised they were ever written, for that matter.”

“But surely you must realize their attraction. How they take up the common textures of our lives-”

“And just what do you think might be common in the textures of our lives, Doctor Guidry?”

He paused. “You’re right, of course. A presumption on my part. Forgive me. Nonetheless, taking the books’ own high ground-scrambling for their shelter, if you like-I have to tell you I found them fascinating. Those first sentences drew me in. I was there . Oil pumps shushing Lew as he stands waiting to kill a man, water oak splitting open like a book in the storm. Lew himself shot, coming half-to there in the emergency room.”

“Parent searching for a lost child.”

“Yes.”

Hands emerged from beneath the blanket and found their way to wheels, swiveling the chair to see what it was I watched over his shoulder. Wrists looked frozen, immobile, knots of bone protruding like cypress roots, fingers swollen and red as sausages. “Young people…. We should never let ourselves get too far away from them.” Then, swiveling the chair back around: “It’s not just another Catholic school, you know-despite the uniforms. Private, yes. But there’s no church affiliation. None. Other parts of the nation, they call it a magnet school. Culling the most talented, most promising students from all the city’s schools, small and large and in between, bringing them together here. I’m privileged to contribute.”

Bending, he plucked a catheter bag from the side of the wheelchair, snapped his finger against the valve at the top, waited a moment, then snapped again. Bright gold fluid flowed into the bag in a gush. He let go of the bag and it swung there at the end of its rubbery placenta, back and forth.

“I know about David, of course.”

I nodded.

“Recently I called to ask if you’d consider finding someone for me.”

“And I declined.”

“You did, yes. And it’s a capacity in which I require you no longer.”

One hand snaked out again from beneath the blanket. A crooked finger hovered. Was I to follow knuckle, first joint, or tip? Each pointed in a different direction.

“There’s a folder on the desk, at the corner there. Perhaps you’d be so good as to retrieve it?”

I did so.

“Therein are copies of letters I’ve received. They may prove of interest.”

Opening the folder, I read the top page and the one under, then shuffled through the rest, perhaps a dozen of them. Each began with some variation of history asserting itself. Memory transports us … In those years … Experience shows that … Those who have no knowledge of history are doomed to repeat it. Santayana I took as a bad sign. This went on, soon enough we’d be getting Shakespeare and Ross Macdonald, quotes from Tocqueville manhandled like soft clay into shapes their author never intended.

“I can keep these?”

He nodded. The nod was easier than pulling out of it. Gravity and time are toll bridges, fares keep going up.

“You know who sent them.”

He started to say more but stopped himself.

“No.”

“A moment ago you spoke as though you did.”

His eyes went from the wall where they’d wandered, back to me. They were amazingly clear. “At first …” Blue springwater tumbling over white stone. “But what I thought then, upon first seeing them, I know can’t possibly be true. You’ve had a chance to look them over now, Mr. Griffin. What do they suggest to you?” His head dipped an eighth of an inch.

“Aside from the fact that you’re withholding information, you mean.”